Feature

1993

﻿Best Haiku About Kids:We have a son in Albuquerque, please tell himCome home for Christmas.

—Bill and Barbara de Funiak, Hinsdale, Ill., 1993

• The paper holds its first-ever haiku contest. A review of R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People appears in an early music section. Soon-to-be Film Editor Devin D. O’Leary’s byline pops up atop graphic novel reviews. Fred’s Bread and Bagel advertises on the Club Calendar pages. Note: All NuCity contributors are paid in “Fred’s Bucks.” Home sales across the state are booming, and the paper can afford four more pages in each issue, pushing the count to 16.

• Wavy Brain, a self-styled “psychotronic” video store specializing in cult films, opens on Lead near UNM. Though short-lived, the store helps spur Albuquerque’s growing love for independent and foreign films. It also inspires local filmmakers to take up their cameras, kicking off a no-budget cinema movement.

• Martin Chavez begins his first term as mayor.

• With skyrocketing growth on the Westside, the city votes to extend Paseo del Norte through part of the petroglyphs. (“The Environmental Planning Commission should really be named the Commission Planning Development in Environmentally Sensitive Areas,” says NuCity.)

• Chris Carter’s groundbreaking sci-fi series “The X-Files” debuts on FOX. The series will run for 202 episodes, finally vanishing without a trace on May 19, 2002.

• Hantavirus surfaces for the first time in a deadly Four Corners-area outbreak.

• Though the hypertext project know as the World Wide Web has been around for a few years on the global system of interconnected computers we call the Internet, it doesn’t really get popular until 1993. Mosaic becomes the first graphic-based web browser. No more Usenet for us! (Although Usenet does leave us with the popular “alt.” prefix. Popular ’90s alt.country bands Wilco and Son Volt will give thanks.)

• Branch Davidian followers in Waco, Texas, stage an armed standoff with agents from the ATF and the FBI. It ends 50 days later in a huge fire that kills dozens of people inside.

• Robert Sanchez, the first New Mexico-born archbishop, resigns after admitting that he’d had sexual relationships with at least five young women in the ’70s and ’80s.